wrong, only 5 distros are free and everyone seems to like including proprietary drivers
That's because the hardware is mostly closed source therefore the drivers are too, but would you prefer proprietary drivers than no drivers or free drivers that contain bugs, lack functionality or are unstable because they are a product of reverse engineering?
The fact that some hardware companies support Linux is a good thing, it means more people will want to use the operating system.
I suppose, you've got me on that one, there again, I wasn't really talking about drivers. I was talking more about applications such as drawing and word-processors. Vendor lock-in with Linux software is highly unlikely even if some proprietary does become popular, for example because the OpenOffice.org.org dominates no one would consider using an office suit on Linux that isn't compatable with it, even if they prefer a proprietary alternative.
obviously you haven't tried any extensions yet
No, because with Opera I don't need any.
you also spelled so many things wrong you NEED Firefox:rolleyes:,
Opera does have a spellchecker but I don't bother using it, perhaps I should, anyway perhaps more software should include a grammar/punctuation checker, since you've missed out capital letters everywhere!
opera has limited functionality and Firefox has been refined amazingly in minefield from what i saw, also,
Looking at it another way, Firefox has limited functionality; the fact that many people have to rely on extensions demonstrates this.
Why should I bother wasting my time with buggy extensions that can possibly break Firefox and
possibly introduce new security flaws when Opera does all I need without any, whilst being faster and uses less resources?
it is very obnoxious to say it is better than Firefox,
Sorry if I've annoyed you, but it should've been obvious that I was expressing my opinion.
There again it depends on what you mean by better, if you're talking about security for example then Opera is better in this regard,
there are not unpatched Opera vulnerabilities whilst
there is still one unpatched Firefox 2.x advisory.
i see why someone would prefer it, but in the end it is a matter of what suits your needs. also because of the modularity it is possible to get 5000+ Firefox developers working on it. so it is released more often
I can also see why you prefer Firefox, the extensions are an advantage but, as I've said previously I'd rather do without them because they pose an additional security risk.
not true. if it was indeed true than things like gnome, xgl, Firefox and Openoffice would not exist
Why wouldn't they exist?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're crap, I like both Gnome and OpenOffice.org but I don't think there's anything particularly novel about either of them.
They don't exist because they're innovative, they exist largely because they are, lower cost than their alternatives, they are good quality and they appeal to people like us who oppose the Microsoft and even Apple.
also a lot of proprietary stuff wasn't innovative either but some was, so too was some open source software innovative*cough*amarok*ahem*
I've never even heard of that, I suppose it isn't something that I would use.
Hell, I wasn't even meaning to say that open source software can't be innovative, it was just my theory as to why some of it isn't very innovative and there is no proof that it is less innovative than proprietary software. I just feel that the ability for companies to keep trade secrets is often a motive for innovation.
I often feel that innovators are mostly relatively small software companies who are trying to get more people using their software, take Opera for example, they are a lot smaller than Netscape or Microsoft but they've produced the one of the most innovative browsers, the lots of features that appear in Firefox have actually been borrowed from it.
have you noticed that Novel has not gone belly up? they are not the only ones who worked on mono and xgl at first but everyone has it now, because you can use the gpl, if someone DOES decide to take your products feature and add it, than take their code and re-brand it yourself, it takes a while to get a new feature into your code unless you have it first (Novel had xgl first) so you if two companies compete than the innovator will rake in and customers will win because companies have to compete or at least aim for different things so that it is a matter of opinion between them, like suse and red hat
I don't buy your argument, for one the companies you're talking about also produce proprietary software and I don't see the big delay in a competitor using code, not to mention that you can't actually make someone pay for free source software.
YEAH windoze does, do YOU run that POS
Being a bit hypocritical aren't we?
A Windows supporter might find that remark very obnoxious.
To answer your question, yes I do run Windows and search the forum if you don't know why.
It is no lie that free software is more reliable. There are good reasons why free software tends to be of high quality. One reason is that free software gets the whole community involved in working together to fix problems. Users not only report bugs, they even fix bugs and send in fixes. Users work together, conversing by email, to get to the bottom of a problem and make the software work trouble-free. Another is that developers really care about reliability. Free software packages do not always compete commercially, but they still compete for a good reputation, and a program which is unsatisfactory will not achieve the popularity that developers hope for. What's more, an author who makes the source code available for all to see puts his reputation on the line, and had better make the software clean and clear, on pain of the community's disapproval.
There is no proof to back up what you have said above, all that is, is an opinion maybe or even a theory, it has been proven no more than my theory that software developers releasing there products as free software might not have any motivation to innovative because they can't keep any trade secrets.
Take the Opera vs Firefox security debate, why is there still an unpatched Firefox advisory? Where are all the 1000,000s of people trying to fix it?
There is also the disadvantage that hackers can find exploits in the source there again most exploits aren't found in the manner.
have you used word to make 3d stuff,
That still doesn't detract from the fact that OpenOffice is playing catch up with Word on a couple of things, sure, you can create better 3D shapes but how many people actually use that feature? Isn't this something more useful in a drawing package? Even then it really belongs in a 3D CAD program and compared to that it's pretty poor.
I would say that OpenOffice.org isn't that far behind MS Office as far as features are concerned but it is enough to put some people off and not without valid reason.
My main criticism with OpenOffice.org is that despite being more compact than MS Office, it still uses more memory, it still takes longer to load than any MS Office program. This is because MS Office is made up of smaller binaries whilst OpenOffice has one big fuck-off soffice.bin, for example you load Word and word.exe loads, you load Writer and soffice.bin loads containing Impress, Calc, Draw etc. even though you don't need them. You might say, oh what about, swriter.exe, sdraw.exe etc? Well those little binaries just launchers, if you look at your task list, you'll find that soffice.bin loads regardless of which launcher you run.
and used word to make sure word xp users and word 95 and 6 users can live in peace?
That's a non-issue for most companies because they just use one version of MS Office let's not even mention the nightmare of incompatibilities between MS Word and OpenOffice.org.
Please also note that I'm looking at this from the user's perspective. I am fully aware that the vendor lock-in associated with MS Office is a bad thing and has noting to do with the quality
of OpenOffice.org, however it does effect how useful it is. You can't just tell everyone who sends you a Word to resend it in ODF or PDF, it will put people off doing business with you.
The whole software game comes down to "Which one is most like Microsoft Word?" And obviously, Word is going to win that match.
Because Word has dominated the market for so long, this will be the case. Suppose a user tries OpenOffice.org only to realise that they can't do something they could in Word, they will drop it like a hot potatoe and come rushing back to MS Word. The only way a word processor can actually beat Word is by being able to do everything that Word can do and more while being cheaper and more stable.
A simple word processor with extensions might be a good idea but I don't always like extensions as the can often cause stability and security issues. Perhaps if they were to be implemented in such a way that they could fuck things up then I would suport them.
